Why Europe Needs to Provide its Own Public Geodata

By
Jo Walsh

Last week, I asked my friend Norm Vine, a stalwart of
the open source GIS community, if he could introduce me to someone at
the U.S. Geological Survey who might be prepared to make a public
statement about public access to national mapping data being a good
thing for the national economy. He seemed genuinely perplexed for a
moment, as if I'd just asked him to put me in touch with a fish that
might be prepared to make a public statement on how water is a good
thing for the marine ecology.

In the U.S., public access to geographic data, "geodata" for short, has
always been taken for granted as being part of the national heritage.
Norm suggested that in the U.S., one of the reasons to have a
government is to have good map data. George Washington himself was a
surveyor and mapmaker. The interior of the North American continent was
unknown to the colonists. In order to establish autonomy in the face of
the colonial powers, they had to create and share accurate spatial
models of where they were.

At that time, Europe was gripped by bitter feuds over scarce but
well-mapped resources. Quarrels resulted in attempts to gain access to
the external resources vital to victory. Different colonial powers
treated the maps that they made and collected very differently. Philip
II kept the national maps of Spain under lock and key. Maps were
powerful military technologies for both attack and defense, and thus
were kept as military secrets. The British Empire published its maps
openly and they were reprinted widely. When you look at the modern maps
of Newfoundland, of the whole North American Eastern Seaboard, it is
the British-applied names that have stayed with us to the present day.

Modern Europe is very different; the colonies are gone. In place of
internal competition is the ideal of free trade in goods and free
movement of citizens, a diplomatic association, and a co-prosperity
zone. European governments work together through the tripartite
structure that is the European Parliament, the European Commission and
the Council of Ministers in order to design common legislative
standards that will allow, or oblige, national agencies to co-operate.
Sharing geographic data across borders is a keystone in the European
effort to collaboratively manage resources, create fairer governance
structures and contribute to each others' economic prosperity.

The national mapping agencies (NMA) of Europe sometimes seem to be
living in the colonial past. Public geodata are kept under lock and
key, through copyright and commercial licensing terms that are
prohibitive to ordinary citizens and spare-time, free-software
enthusiasts who want to undertake amateur GIS projects. Europe's
governing agencies, especially those that collect census information
and manage resource networks, find it hard to cooperate. They speak
different languages, use different cadastral and spatial models, and
use different technology platforms and sets of standards internally.
Europe's current loosely joined spatial data infrastructures are not
only unpredictable; they're not even predictably unpredictable.

The proposed INSPIRE Directive (press
release) on establishing a common spatial data infrastructure in
Europe is the latest and greatest in a long series of initiatives
undertaken by NMA representatives to fix some of these problems.
INSPIRE aims to establish common standards for describing the physical
world and the things in it, and to establish a framework across which
different agencies that collect data can share data with one another. A
common framework is something that Europe badly needs to maintain
integrity.

The terms in which INSPIRE is being dictated reflect the false
dichotomy which has troubled the internal governance of the European
Union deeply over the last year. In the red corner, the "Anglo-Saxon
economic liberalism" proposes(?) privatizing public services that used
to be managed by the state, regardless of whether the market will
provide the same and necessary level of service. In the blue corner,
the "old-fashioned centrist socialism proposes(?) maintaining state
ownership of public support services, whether or not it makes
functional or financial sense to do so. If the European debate has to
be a question of taking sides, then the privatizing and liberalizing
tendency is "winning." It is using market logic and protective market
instruments to reinforce itself. Each time the INSPIRE Directive draft
has gone to a new stage in the co-decision process, the thematic types
of data that it covers decrease; therefore the options that the public
will have to even view images of geodata, let alone get access to them
and work with them in their own GISs, are decreasing. The second
version of the INSPIRE Directive has a new emphasis on protecting the
intellectual property rights of the agencies that collect and
distribute public geodata.

NMAs are under a lot of pressure to perform well financially on
government spreadsheets. The data they collect, after all, have the
power to generate an immense quantity of new economic value, in
particular in the design of new kinds of intelligent transport systems
for goods and for people. Europe's GALILEO project, a global navigation
satellite system, is touted mostly for the transformational potential
it can affect on transportation systems. GALILEO is a good case for a
"middle way" in providing all citizens access to a free, public
service, overseen by government and maintained by private industrial
efforts. There is a guarantee that GALILEO will provide a useful free
signal, with ultra-high-accuracy signals available at a price, for
crucial infrastructural and safety-critical operations. GALILEO is also
an attempt to lessen Europe's growing economic and social dependency on
the GPS system provided by the U.S. government and its military
agencies. All the public domain mapping data that people all over the
world are trying to use to build the new geospatial Web - Landsat
imagery, STRM terrain models, the GeoNET gazetteer of world placenames
- is provided for free and in the public domain by the U.S. government
and its military agencies.

As Europe moves into the 21st century, it needs to design a common
spatial data infrastructure that works for all of its citizens. INSPIRE
is not that infrastructure. The NMAs that designed it are quite rightly
fearful for their role, with increasingly viable commercial
alternatives to the data they collect and provide on the one hand, and
government pressure to privatize formerly state-owned information
infrastructure and gain short term profit from it, on the other.
INSPIRE does not reflect the full debate around, or the full potential
in, spatial data infrastructure as a tremendous engine of research
innovation, new kinds of economic activity, and a reformed practice of
civic engineering.

So far the debate has been largely polarized between "information wants
to be free!" and "you get what you pay for!" There are plenty of
alternative models that can exist. GALILEO indicates where a good one
may be - the offering of generalized geodata, lower-accuracy but still
usable for most applications, free to access and free for use by the
public. NMAs, or whatever kind of new agency succeeds them in the
information market, can charge large commercial players for
ultra-high-accuracy data and still find it possible to recoup some of
their costs. Many European academics, researchers, small business
persons and open source software developers are crying out for public
access to the geodata that describe their world. They offer many new
and accurate insights into how Europe can overcome the description
problems inherent in having 25 different spatial models in as many
different languages.

I started talking about this with Norm Vine, because I've been working
with Benjamin Henrion of the Foundation
for Free Information Infrastructures. Henrion worked hard to roll
back the Software Patents Directive that would have put the brakes on
the potential for small businesses and academics in Europe to create
their own software. Henrion and I are putting together a wiki website
at which people can: learn more about the history of INSPIRE; find out
how to get involved in the lobbying process; find others who consider
INSPIRE to be designed without proper public consultation and without
consideration for the negative economic and social effects that it may
have. We've also started a public petition to give to members of the
European Parliament. Were urging them to look again at what must
appear to most people outside of the geographic information industry to
be a pretty obscure technical directive. But they underestimate the
impact it will actually have on how Europe is managed and governed.

If you're in Europe, please support this effort by signing the petition, talking
to your non-GI friends about it and asking them to sign it too. If
you're outside Europe, keep watching this space. The decisions made
here and now about the next generation of spatial data infrastructure
may impact your rights to get access to public geodata describing the
world around you, and faster than you think.